Motorola unveils its first Intel Android smartphone, but the USA isn’t invited to the x86 party

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At a joint press conference in London, Motorola and Intel have unveiled the Razr I smartphone. The Razr I has an “edge-to-edge” 960×540 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display, a layer of Kevlar on the back, and — most importantly — the brains of the operation is an Intel Medfield SoC clocked at 2GHz. It will be released in Europe and Latin America in October, but there’s no word on pricing.

Rounding out the hardware specs, there’s an 8-megapixel rear shooter, a front-facing VGA camera, NFC, a 2000 mAh battery that is apparently “40% more powerful” than the iPhone 4S, and the entire phone (including the internal components) is protected by a “splash-guard” water repellent coating. If you think these specs sound familiar, that’s because the Razr I is virtually identical to the Razr M — but while the I is powered by an Intel x86 chip, the M is powered by a dual-core Snapdragon S4 ARM chip. Unlike the Razr M, though, it seems like the Razr I (by virtue of Intel’s XMM6260 baseband) only supports HSPA+, not LTE. Considering LTE is almost nonexistent in Europe, that’s not a huge loss.

On the software side of things, rather excitingly, it looks like the Razr I runs an almost-vanilla version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We’ve known for a while that Intel has had a large team of developers working on an x86 port of ICS, so it’s good to see that they’ve finally finished. As far as x86 compatibility goes, the press release is claiming that the Razr I has access to 600,000 apps in the Google Play Store — so, that’s near-universal compatibility.

And now it’s time to talk about Medfield, the Atom SoC that powers the Razr I. Intel’s partnership with Motorola dates all the way back to Medfield’s January unveil, when they announced that there was a multi-year deal to bring Intel chips to a range of Motorola phones and tablets. As far as we can tell, the Razr I has the same SoC as the Xolo X900 — the first Medfield-powered smartphone — but this time around the chip is clocked at 2GHz, rather than 1.5GHz. Even at 1.5GHz, Medfield (which is just a single-core chip with Hyper-Threading) was very competitive; at 2GHz, the Razr I should have no problem standing against most smartphones on the market. The only real weakness is Medfield’s GPU — an old PowerVR SGX540, which is much, much slower than any recently-released smartphone. This shouldn’t affect video playback, though, as Medfield contains dedicated hardware for 1080p playback.

One of the weirder aspects of today’s product announcement is that the Razr I won’t be made available in the US and Canada; it’ll only ever see the light of day in Europe and some parts of Latin America (Mexico, Brazil). In fact, to date, four Medfield-powered Android smartphones have been released — the Xolo X900, Lenovo K800, Orange San Diego, and now the Razr I — but not a single one of them is available in the US.

Why? The most likely reason is that Intel isn’t quite ready to face off against the latest and greatest SoCs in the most hotly contested smartphone battleground. Intel knows that in a head-on confrontation with Samsung or Apple, Medfield would lose. By launching products in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, Intel is accruing the experience, confidence, and market research that it’ll need to crack the US. When Intel finally comes to the US, probably with a Motorola phone powered by the 22nm successor to Medfield (Merrifield/Silvermont), it will come prepared. I don’t think Intel will come to the US until it think it can beat ARM — and judging by Chipzilla’s investment in mobile and its continuing technological superiority, I suspect Merrifield will do just that.

Yes, that’s his point — I said it wasn’t available in North America, but then said it was available in Mexico, contradicting myself. It’s all fixed now!

http://twitter.com/robinashe Robin Ashe

Mexico is sometimes considered to be ‘Central America’ along with the northern part of South America.

VirtualMark

This phone looks interesting, just watched a presentation on the bbc. Apparently it will be very competitively priced and offer long battery life with heavy use. I’ll wait to see some benchmarks before i believe that.
One other interesting feature is the ability to take HDR images, i’d assume it just takes 3 or more photos in rapid succession at different exposures. These images can look very nice if done well.
The only thing that is a bit worrying is the use of a single core chip – most phones seem to be at least dual core now, which certainly offers a lot of advantages. Again i’ll wait to see how the benchmarks compare to other phones.
As far as 4g goes – we’re having to wait until 2013 for the auctions to take place. Only one company in the UK will be able to offer 4g before then, so its not too worrying that this phone doesn’t support it.

http://www.facebook.com/qdewolf Quentin Dewolf

if this ran win 8 then could it run windows desktop apps?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Sure!

(And Windows Phone 8 actually has the Windows 8 kernel, which will allow quite a lot of cross-compatibility.)

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TJICZOJLZO5QUMYB2G57TG7VJU Patrick C

“EXTREMETECH: Motorola Unveils Its First Android Phone”

Please correct the link title!

some_guy_said

Motorola unveils its first INTEL android phone, you mean. Which it already says…

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TJICZOJLZO5QUMYB2G57TG7VJU Patrick C

Not on the link from the PCMag front page.

alpha_centaur

love the Kevlar coating !

rgarciao

I think that the US market is less evolved than Asian and LA markets. One example is that on those markets Samsung had to use a quad-core ship on SIII just to put it on those markets. In the US, because the market is so close, and with the current legal developments, the US market will not be one to put new technologies as in this case, Asian and European markets that have better services for mobile equipments.

http://twitter.com/robinashe Robin Ashe

The reason Samsung went with the S4 in the US is for the LTE support, which is actually the US being more advanced. Only Qualcomm makes an SOC with LTE and good power management.

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